802.1Qat - Stream Reservation Protocol

The full title of this PAR is "Standard for Local and Metropolitan Area Networks - Virtual
Bridged Local Area Networks - Amendment: 9: Stream Reservation Protocol (SRP)".

This standard specifies protocols, procedures and managed
objects, usable by existing higher layer mechanisms, that allow network resources to be reserved
for specific traffic streams traversing a bridged local area network. It identifies traffic streams to
a level sufficient for bridges to determine the required resources and provides a mechanism for
dynamic maintenance of those resources.

This standard provides a signaling protocol to enable the
end-to-end management of resource reservation for QoS guaranteed streams. The signaling
protocol facilitates the registration, deregistration, and retention of resource reservation
information in relevant network elements. The signaling protocol is an essential component for
automatic configuration in bridged local area network applications that require latency and
bandwidth guarantees.

Many vendors and users desire a single network infrastructure to
carry various multimedia applications such as digital video, high-fidelity digital audio, and
gaming traffic, as well as non-time-sensitive traffic (e.g., data traffic). The application of current
IEEE 802 technologies for high quality time sensitive streaming allows users to load their
networks unknowingly to the extent that the user experience is negatively impacted. To provide
the robust guaranteed QoS capability for streaming applications, the availability of network
resources along the entire data path must be assured before transmission takes place. This
requires the definition of traffic stream descriptors and a protocol to signal the resource
reservation along the end-to-end path of streams. MRP will be used as a basis for this protocol.